“He refused point-blank to go to college. At the time of his death at the age of twenty-one, he was curiously unbalanced. In many ways he was abysmally ignorant. For instance, he knew nothing whatever of the higher mathematics and he swore that of all knowledge this was the most useless, for, far from being the one solid fact in the universe, he contended that mathematics were the most unstable and unsure. He knew nothing of sociology, economics, philosophy or science. He never kept himself posted on current events and he knew no more of modern history than he had learned in school. But he did know ancient history and he had a great store of ancient magic, Kirowan.
“He was interested in ancient languages and was perversely stubborn in his use of obsolete words and archaic phrases. Now how, Kirowan, did this comparatively uncultured youth, with no background of literary heredity behind him, manage to create such horrific images as he did?”
“Why,” said I, “poets feel—they write from intuition rather than knowledge. A great poet may be a very ignorant man in other ways, and have no real concrete knowledge on his own poetic subjects. Poetry is a weave of shadows—impressions cast on the consciousness which cannot be described otherwise.”
“Exactly!” Conrad snapped. “And whence came these impressions to Justin Geoffrey? Well, to continue, the change in Justin began when he was ten years old. His dreams seem to date from a night he spent near an old deserted farmhouse. His family were visiting some friends who lived in a small village in New York State—up close to the foot of the Catskills. Justin, I gather, went fishing with some other boys, strayed away from them, got lost and was found by the searchers next morning slumbering peacefully in the grove which surrounds the house. With the characteristic stolidity of the Geoffreys, he had been unshaken by an experience which would have driven many a small boy into hysteria. He merely said that he had wandered over the countryside until he came to this house and being unable to get in, had slept among the trees, it being late in the summer. Nothing had frightened him, but he said that he had had strange and extraordinary dreams which he could not describe but which had seemed strangely vivid at the time. This alone was unusual—the Geoffreys were no more troubled with nightmares than a hog is.
“But Justin continued to dream wildly and strangely and, as I said, to change in thoughts, ideas and demeanor. Evidently then, it was that incident which made him what he was. I wrote to the mayor of the village asking him if there was any legend connected with the house but his reply, while arousing my interest, told me nothing. He merely said that the house had been there ever since anyone could remember, but had been unoccupied for at least fifty years. He said the ownership was in some dispute. He said that as far as he knew, no unsavory tales were connected with it, and he sent me a snapshot of it.” Here Conrad produced a small print and held it up for me to see. I sprang up, almost startled.
“That? Why, Jim, I’ve seen that same landscape before—those tall sombre oaks, with the castle-like house half concealed among them—I’ve got it! It’s a painting by Humphrey Skuyler, hanging in the art gallery of the Harlequin Club.”
“Indeed!” Conrad’s eyes lighted up. “Why, both of us know Skuyler well. Let’s go up to his studio and ask him what he knows about the house, if anything.”
We found the artist hard at work, as usual, on a bizarre subject. As he was fortunate in being of a very wealthy family, he was able to paint for his own enjoyment—and his tastes ran to the weird and outre. He was not a man who affected unusual dress and manners, but he looked the temperamental artist. He was about my height, some five feet and ten inches, but he was slim as a girl, with long white nervous fingers, a knife-edge face and a shock of unruly hair tumbling over a high pale forehead.
“The house, yes,” he said in his quick, jerky manner, “I painted it. I was looking on a map one day and the name Old Dutchtown intrigued me. I went up there hoping for some subjects, but I found nothing in the town. I did find that old house several miles out.”
“I wondered, when I saw the painting,” I said, “why you merely painted a deserted house without the usual accompaniment of ghastly faces peering out of the upstairs windows or misshapen shapes roosting on the gables.”
“No?” he snapped. “And didn’t anything about the mere picture impress you?”
“Yes, it did,” I admitted. “It made me shudder.” “Exactly!” he cried. “To have elaborated the painting with figures from my own paltry brain would have spoiled the effect. The effect of horror is best gained when the sensation is most intangible. To put the horror in visible shape, no matter how gibbous or mistily, is to lessen the effect. I paint an ordinary tumble-down farmhouse with the hint of a ghastly face at a window; but this house—this house—needs no such mummery or charlatanry. It fairly exudes an aura of abnormality—that is, to a man sensitive to such impressions.”
Conrad nodded. “I received that impression from the snapshot. The trees exclude much of the building but the architecture seems very unfamiliar to me.”
“I should say so. I’m not altogether unversed in the history of architecture and I was unable to classify it. The natives say it was built by the Dutch who first settled that part of the country, but the style is no more Dutch than Greek. There’s something almost Oriental about the thing, and yet it’s not that, either. At any rate, it’s old— that cannot be denied.”
“Did you go into the house?”
“I did not. The doors and windows were locked and I had no desire to commit burglary. It hasn’t been long since I was prosecuted by a crabbed old farmer in Vermont for forcing my way into an old deserted house of his in order to paint the interior.”
“Will you go with me to Old Dutchtown?” asked Conrad suddenly.
Skuyler smiled. “I see your interest is aroused—yes, if you think you can get us into the house without having us dragged up in court afterwards. I have an eccentric enough reputation as it is; a few more suits like the one I mentioned and I’ll be looked on as a complete lunatic. And what about you, Kirowan?”
“Of course I'll go,” I answered.
“I was sure of that,” said Conrad.
And so we came to Old Dutchtown on a warm late summer morning.
“Drowsy and dull with age the houses blink,
On aimless streets that youthfulness forget—
But what time-grisly figures glide and slink
Down the old alleys when the moon has set?”
Thus Conrad quoted the phantasies of Justin Geoffrey as we looked down on the slumbering village of Old Dutchtown from the hill over which the road passed before descending into the crooked dusty streets.
“Do you suppose he had this town in mind when he wrote that?”
“It fits the description, doesn’t it—‘High gables of an earlier, ruder age,’ look—there are your Dutch houses and old Colonial buildings—I can see why you were attracted by this town, Skuyler; it breathes the very musk of antiquity. Some of those houses are three hundred years old. And what an atmosphere of decadence hovers over the whole town!”
We were met by the mayor of the place, a man whose up-to-the-minute clothes and manners contrasted oddly with the sleepiness of the town and the slow, easy-going ways of most of the natives. He remembered Skuyler’s visit there—indeed, the coming of any stranger into this little backwash town was an event to be remembered by the inhabitants. It seemed strange to think that within a hundred miles or so there roared and throbbed the greatest metropolis in the world.
Conrad could not wait a moment, so the mayor accompanied us to the house. The first glance of it sent a shudder of repulsion through me. It stood in the midst of a sort of upland, between two fertile farms, the stone fences of which ran to within a hundred yards or so on either side. A ring of tall, gnarled oaks entirely surrounded the house, which glimmered through their branches like a bare and time-battered skull.
“Who owns this land?” the artist asked.
“Why, the title is in some dispute,” answered the mayor. “Jedi
ah Alders owns that farm there, and Squire Abner owns the other. Abner claims the house is part of the Alders farm, and Jediah is just as loud in his assertion that the Squire’s grandfather bought it from the Dutch family who first owned it.”
“That sounds backwards,” commented Conrad. “Each one denies ownership.”
“That’s not so strange,” said Skuyler. “Would you want a place like that to be part of your estate?”
“No,” said Conrad after a moment’s silent contemplation, “I wouldn’t.”
“Between ourselves,” broke in the mayor, “neither of the farmers wants to pay the taxes on the property as the land about it is absolutely useless. The barrenness of the soil extends for some little distance in all directions and the seed planted close to those stone fences on both farms yields little. These oak trees seem to sap the very life of the soil.”
“Why haven’t the trees been cut down?” asked Conrad. “I have never encountered any sentiment among the farmers of this state.”
“Why, as the ownership has been in dispute for the past fifty years, no one has taken it upon himself to cut them. And then the trees are so old and of such sturdy growth it would entail a great deal of labor. And there is a foolish superstition attached to that grove—a long time ago a man was badly cut by his own axe, trying to chop down one of the trees—an accident that might occur anywhere—and the villagers attached over-much importance to the incident.”
“Well,” said Conrad, “if the land about the house is useless, why not rent the building itself, or sell it?”
For the first time the mayor looked embarrassed. “None of the villagers would rent or buy it, as no good land goes with it, and to tell you the truth, it has been found impossible to enter the house!”
“Impossible?”
“Well,” he amended, “the doors and windows are heavily barred and bolted, and either the keys are in possession of someone who doesn’t care to divulge the secret, or else they’ve been lost. I have thought that possibly someone was using the house for a boot-leg den and had a reason for keeping the curious out, but no light has ever been seen there, and no one is ever seen slinking about the place.”
We had passed through the circling ring of sullen oaks and stood before the building. Seen from this vantage point, the house was formidable. It had a strange air of remoteness, as if, even though we could reach out and touch it, it stood far from us in some distant place, in another age, another time.
“I’d like to get into it,” said Skuyler.
“Try,” invited the mayor.
“Do you mean it?”
“I don’t see why not. Nobody’s bothered about the house as long as I can remember. No one’s paid taxes on the property for so long that I suppose technically it belongs to the county. It could be put up for sale, but nobody’d want it.”
Skuyler tried the door perfunctorily. The mayor watched him, a smile of amusement on his lips. Then Skuyler threw himself at the door. Not so much as a tremor moved it.
“I told you—they’re locked and barred, all the doors and windows. Short of demolishing the frame, you won’t get in.”
“I could do that,” said Skuyler.
“Perhaps,” said the mayor.
Skuyler picked up a sizable oak limb that had fallen.
“Don’t,” said Conrad suddenly.
But Skuyler had already moved forward. He ignored the door and thrust at the nearest window. He missed the frame, struck the glass, and shattered it. The oak limb came up against bars beyond.
“Don’t do it,” siad Conrad again, more earnestly.
The expression on his face was baffling.
Skuyler dropped the limb in disgust.
“Don’t you feel it?” asked Conrad then.
A rush of cool air had come out of the broken window, smelling of dust and age.
“Perhaps we’d better leave it be,” said the mayor uneasily.
Skuyler backed away.
“You never can tell,” said the mayor lamely.
Conrad stood as if in a trance. Then he moved forward and bent his head in the opening in the window pane. He stood there in an attitude of listening, his eyes half closed. He braced himself against the house; I saw that his hand was trembling. “Great winds!” he whispered. “A maelstrom of winds.”
“Jim!” I said sharply.
He pulled away from the window. His face was strange. His lips were parted almost ecstatically. His eyes glittered. “I did hear something,” he said.
“You wouldn’t hear even a rat in there,” said the mayor. “They need food to stay in a place—and failing it, won’t stay.”
“Great winds,” said Conrad again, shaking his head.
“Let’s move,” said Skuyler, as if he had forgotten why we had come.
No one proposed to stay. The house had affected all of us so disagreeably that our quest was forgotten.
But Conrad had not forgotten it. As we drove away from Skuyler’s studio, after leaving the artist there, he said, “Kirowan—I’m going back there some day.”
I said nothing, neither of encouragement nor of protest, certain that he would put it out of his mind in a few days.
He said no more of Justin Geoffrey and the poet’s strange life.
II
It was a week before I saw Conrad again. I had forgotten the house in the oaks, and Justin Geoffrey as well. But the sight of Conrad’s drawn, haggard face, and the expression in his eyes brought Geoffrey and the house back with a rush, for I knew intuitively that Conrad had gone back there.
“Yes,” he admitted, whenlput ittohim. “Iwantedto duplicate Geoffrey’s experience—to spend a night near the house, in the circle of oak trees. I did it. And since then—the dreams! I have not had a night free of them. I have had little sleep. I did get into the house.”
“If that inquiry into Justin Geoffrey’s life has brought you to this, Jim—forget it, give it up.”
He gave me an almost pitying look, so that it was clear to me that he thought I did not understand.
“Too late,” he said bluntly. “I came to see whether you'd take over my affairs if—if something should happen to me.”
“Don’t talk that way,” I cried, alarmed.
“It’s no good to lecture me, Kirowan,” he said. “I’ve set my affairs pretty much in order.”
“Have you seen a doctor?” I asked.
He shook his head. “There’s nothing any doctor could do, believe me. Will you do it?”
“Of course—but I hope it will never be necessary.” He took a bulky envelope from the inner pocket of his coat. “I’ve brought you this, Kirowan. Read it when you’ve time.”
I took it. “You’ll want it back?”
“No. Keep it. Burn it when you’ve done with it. Do whatever you want with it. It doesn't matter.”
As abruptly as he had come, he took his departure. The change in him was remarkable and profoundly disturbing.
He seemed no longer the James Conrad 1 had known for so many years. I watched him go with many misgivings, but 1 knew I could not stay his course. That extraordinary abandoned house had altered his personality to an astonishing degree—if indeed it were that. A deep depression coupled with a kind of black despair had possession of him.
I tore open the envelope at once. The manuscript inside bore, in the appearance of its script, every aspect of urgent haste.
“I want you, Kirowan, to know the events of the past week. I am sure I need hardly tell an old friend who has known me as long as you have, that I lost no time going back to that house in the oaks. (Did it ever occur to you that oaks and the Druids are closely related in folklore?) I returned the next night, and I went with crowbar and sledge and everything necessary to break down the frame of door or window so that I could get into the house. I had to get in—I knew it when 1 felt that uncanny draught of cold air flowing out of it. That day was warm, you’ll remember—and the air inside that closed house might have been cool, but not cold as an Arctic wind
!
‘‘It is not important to set down the agonizing details of my breaking into the house; let me say only it was as if the house fought me through every nail and splinter! But I succeeded. I took out the window Skuyler broke in his ill- advised attempt to batter his way in. (And he knew very well—he felt it, too—why he gave up so easily!)
“The interior of the house is in sharp contrast to its atmosphere. It is still furnished, and I judge that the furniture goes back at the least to the early nineteenth century; I’d guess it’s eighteenth century. All otherwise very commonplace—nothing fancy about the interior at all. But the air is cold—(I came prepared for that)—very cold, and stepping into the house was like entering another latitude. Dust, of course, and lint, and cobwebs in the comers and on the ceiling.
“Apart from the cold and the atmosphere of utter strangeness, there was one more thing—there was a skeleton sitting in a chair in what was evidently the study of the house, for there were books on the shelves. The clothes had pretty well fallen away, but what was left of them indicated that it was a man’s skeleton, as did the bones, too. I could not tell how he died, but since the house was so well locked and barred from the inside, I concluded that he had either taken his own life or had been aware that he was dying and made these preparations before death overtook him.
“But even this is not important. The presence of that skeleton there did not impress me as extraordinary—not nearly as much as the atmosphere of the house. 1 have mentioned the unnatural cold. Well, the very house was as unnatural inside as it appeared to be from the outside. It was, I felt at once, literally a house in another world, another dimension, separated from our own time and space and yet bound tenuously to it. How ambiguous this must sound to you!